LITERATURE, SCIENCE AND HUMAN NATURE 

'wanted him to become a rabbi and he seemed to himself gruesomely unlike a rabbi now in the trunks and straw hat, his face charged with heavy sadness, foolish utter longing of which a religious life might have purged him. That mouth! - heavy with desire and irreconcilable anger, the straight nose sometimes grim, the dark eyes! And his figure! - the long veins winding in the arms and filling in the hanging hands, an ancient system, of greater antiquity than the Jews themselves….Bare legged, he looked like a Hindu.'

    A reader may not understand from the inside every specific of Herzog's condition - a mid-twentieth century American, a Jew, a city dweller, a divorce, an alienated intellectual, and nor might a young reader sympathise with the remorse of early middle age, but self scrutiny that is edging towards a reckoning has a general currency, as does the droll, faux naive perception that one's biology - the circulatory system - predates, and by implication, is even more of whet essence of being human, that one's religion. Literature flourishes along the channels of this unspoken agreement between writers and readers, offering a mental map whose north and south are the specific, and the general. At its best, literature is universal, illuminating human nature at precisely the point at which it is most parochial and specific.
   Greatness in science is harder for most of us grasp. We can make a list of scientists we've been told are great, but few of us have had the kind of intimate contact that would illuminate the particular qualities of the achievement. Partly, it's the work itself - it doesn't invite us in - it's objectifying, therefore distancing, corrupted by difficult or seemingly irrelevant detail. Mathematics is also a barrier. Furthermore, scientific ideas happily float free of their creators. Scientists might know the classical Laws of Thermodynamics, but have never read Newton on the matter, or have grasped relativity from text books without reading Einstein's Special or General Theories, or know the structure of DNA without having - or needing - a first hand knowledge of Crick an Watson's 1953 paper. Here's a good case in point. Their paper, a mere twelve hundred words, published in the journal Nature, ended with the famously modest conclusion

'It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material'.

'It has not escaped our notice…' the drawing room pollutes of the double negative is touchingly transparent. It roughly translates as 'Look at us everybody! We've found the mechanism by which life on earth replicates, we're exited as hell and can't sleep a wink….' It has not escaped our notice is the kind of close contact I mean. It is not easily come by at first hand.
   However, there is one pre-eminent scientist who is almost as approachable in this respect as a novelist. It's perfectly possible for the non-scientist to understand what it is in Darwin's work which makes him unique and great. In part, it is the sequence of benign accidents that set him on his course, each step to be measured against the final achievement. And partly it's the subject itself. Natural history, or biology generally, is a descriptive science. The theory of natural selection is not, in its essentials, difficult to understand, though its implications have been vast, its applications formidable and the consequences in scientific terms quite complex - as the computational biology of the late Bill Hamilton shows. Partly too, because Darwin, though hardly the greatest prose writer of the nineteenth century, was intensely communicative, affectionate, intimate and honest. He wrote many letters, and filled many notebooks.
   Let us read his life as a novel, like Herzog, driving forwards a great reckoning. The sixteen year old Charles is at University in Edinburgh and beginning to show disillusionment with the study of medicine. He writes to his sisters that 'I am going to learn to stuff birds, from a blackamoor.' Charles took his lessons in taxidermy from one John Edmonstone, a freed slave, and found his teacher 'very pleasant and intelligent'. Edmonstone recounted to the young Darwin his experiences as a slave, and described the wonders of a tropical rain forest to him. All his life, Darwin abhorred slavery, and his early acquaintanceship may have had some bearing on the relatively neglected book of Darwin's I want to discuss. The following year Darwin comes in contact with the evolutionary ideas of Lamarke, and in the Edinburgh debating societies hears passionate, godless arguments for scientific materialism. He spends days foraging along the shores of the Firth of Forth looking for sea creatures and an 1827 notebook records detailed observations of two marine invertebrates.
   Since Charles did not warm to the prospect of becoming a physician, his father 'proposed that I should become a clergyman. He was very properly vehement against my turning an idle sporting man, which then seemed my probable destination'. So he studied at Cambridge where at the age of eighteen, his love of natural history is becoming a passion. 'What fun we will have together,' he writes to his cousin, 'what beetles we will catch, it will do my heart good to go once more together to some of our old haunts…we will make regular campaigns into the Fens; Heaven protect the beetles .' And in another letter, 'I am dying by inches from not having anybody to talk to about insects'. In his last two terms, his mentor, Henslowe, Professor of Botany persuades him to take up geology.
   After Cambridge, the offer comes through Henslowe to be the naturalist and companion to the captain on board the Beagle making a government survey of South America. We may follow the wrangling as he persuades his father, with the help of Uncle Joseph Wedgewood. 'I must state again' implores the earnest Charles, 'I cannot think it would unfit me hereafter for a steady life'. Many weeks of delay, then after two false starts, he sets sail on 27th December 1831. Days of seasickness, then the Beagle is prevented by quarantine measures from landing in La Palma in the Canaries. But Charles has a net in the stern of the ship, the weather is fine and he catches 'a great number of curious animals, and fully occupied my time in my cabin.' Finally, landfall at St Jago in the Cape de Verde islands, and the young man in ecstasy. 'The island has given me so much instruction and delight…' he writes to his father, 'it is utterly useless to say anything about the scenery - it would be as profitable to explain to a blind man colours, as to person who has not been out of Europe, the total dissimilarity of a tropical view…Whenever I enjoy anything I always look forward to writing it down…- So you must excuse raptures and those raptures badly expressed'.
   He enjoys working in his cramped cabin, drawing and describing his specimens of rocks, plants and animals and preserving them to send them back to England, to Henslowe. The enthusiasm does not die as the expedition proceeds, but to it is added a growing scientific confidence He writes to Henslowe,'…nothing has so much interested me as finding two species of elegantly coloured Planariae, inhabiting the dry frost! The false relation they bear to snails is the most extraordinary thing of the kind I have ever seen… some of the marine species possess an organisation so marvellous that I can scarcely credit my eyesight…Today I have been out and returned like Noah's ark, with animals of all sorts…I have fond a most curious snail, and spiders, beetles, snakes, scorpions ad libitum. And to conclude, shot a Cavia weighing one hundredweight…'
   With vast quantities of his preserved specimens preceding him, and already being described, and with his own theories about the formation of the earth, and of coral reefs taking shape in his mind, Darwin arrives back in England five years later, at the age of twenty seven, already a scientist of some standing. There is something of the thrill and illumination of great literature when Darwin at the age of twenty nine, only two years after he had returned form his voyage on the Beagle, and still twenty one years before he would publish The Origin of Species, confides to a pocket notebook the first hints of a simple, beautiful idea: 'Origin of man now proved…He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke'.
   And yet the Origin of Species itself does not allow an easy route into an understanding of Darwin's greatness. Read as a book rather than as a theory, it can overwhelm the non-specialist reader with a profileration of instances - the fruits of Darwin's delay - and it's significant that the most frequently quoted passages occur in the final paragraph.
   Darwin was the sort of scientist whose work completely permeated his life. His study of the earth worms in the garden at Downe is well known. He attended country markets to quize hors, dog and pig breeders, and at country shows he sought out growers of prize vegetables. 'My first child was born on December 27th 1839, and I at once commenced to make notes on the first dawn of the various expressions which he exhibited…' Long before an innate theory of mind had been postulated, Darwin was experimenting and reaching his own conclusions.

When a few days over six months old, his nurse pretended to cry, and I saw that his face instantly assumed a melancholy expression, with the corners of the mouth strongly depressed. Therefore it seems to me that an innate feeling must have told him that the pretended crying of his nurse expressed grief; and this, through the instinct of sympathy, exited grief in him.

While out riding, he stops to talk to a woman, and notes the contraction in her brows as she looks up at him with the sun at his back. At home he takes three of his children out into the garden and gets them to look up at a bright portion of the sky. The reason? 'With all three, the orbicular, corrugator, and pyramidal muscles were energetically contracted, through reflex action….' Over many years, while engaged on other work, Darwin was researching the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, his most extraordinary and approachable book, rich in observed detail and brilliant speculation, beautifully illustrated - one of the first scientific books to use photographs, including some of his own baby pouting and laughing - and now available in a third edition, prepared and annotated by the great American psychologist of the emotions, Paul Ekman. Darwin not only sets out to describe expressions in dogs and cats an well as man, - how we contract the muscles around our eyes when we are angry an reveal our canine teeth, and how, in Ekman's words, we want to touch with our faces those we love - he also poses the difficult question why. Why do we redden with embarrassment rather than go pale? Why do the inner corners of the brow lift in sorrow, and not the whole brow? Why do cats arch their backs in affection? An emotion, he argued, was a physiological state, a direct expression of physiological change. In pursuit of these questions, there are numerous pleasing digressions and observations: the way a billiard player, especially a novice, tries to guide the ball towards its targets with the movement of the head, or even the whole body. How a cross child sitting on it's parent's knee raises one shoulder and gives a backward push with it in an expression of rejection; the firm closure of the mouth during a delicate of difficult operation.
   Behind this wealth of detail lay more basic questions. Do we learn to smile when we are happy, or is the smile innate? In other words, are expressions universal to all cultures and races, or are they culture specific? He wrote to people in remote corners of the British Empire asking them to observe the expressions of the indigenous populations. In England he showed photographs of various expressions and asked people to comment on them. He drew on his own experience. The book is anecdotal, unscientific, and very clear-sighted. The expressions of emotion are the products of evolution, Darwin argued, and therefore universal. He opposed the influential views of the anatomist of Sir Charles Bell that certain unique muscles, with no equivalent in the animal kingdom, had been created by God in the faces of men to allow them to communicate their feelings to each other. In a footnote, Ekman quotes from Bell's book: 'the most remarkable muscle in the human face is the corrugator supercili which knits the eyebrows with an enigmatic effect which unaccountably but irresistibly conveys the idea of mind'. In Darwin's copy of Bell's book, Darwin has underlined the passage and written, '….I suspect he never dissected monkey'. Of course, these muscles, as Darwin showed, existed in other primates.
   By showing that the same principles governing expression applied in primates and man, Darwin argued for continuity and gradation of species - important generally to his theory of evolution, and to disproving the Christian view that man was a special creation, set apart from all other animals. He was intent too on demonstrating through universality, a common descent for all races of mankind. In this he opposed himself forcefully to the racist views of scientists like Agassiz who argued that Africans were inferior to Europeans because they were descended from a different and inferior stock. In a letter to Hooker, Darwin mentions how Agassiz had been maintaining the doctrine of 'several species' (i.e. of man) 'much, I daresay, to the comfort of slave holding Southerns.'
   Modern palaeontology and molecular biology show Darwin to have been right, and Agassiz wrong: we are descended from a common stock of anatomically modern humans who migrated out of east Africa perhaps as recently as two hundred thousand years ago and spread around the world. Local differences in climate have produced variations in the species that are in many cases literally skin deep. We have fetishized these differences to rationalise conquest and subjugation. As Darwin puts it:

all the chief expressions exhibited by man are the same through out the world. This fact is interesting as it affords a new argument in favour of the several races being descended from a single parent stock, which must have been almost completely human in structure, and to a large extent, in mind, before the period at which the races diverged from each other.

We should be clear about what is implied by the universal expressions of emotion. The eating of a snail or a piece of cheddar may give rise to delight in one culture and disgust in another. But disgust, regardless of the cause, has a universal expression - In Darwin's words, 'The mouth is opened widely, with the upper lip strongly retracted, which wrinkles the side of the nose…' The expression and the physiology are products of evolution. But emotions are also, of course, shaped by culture. Our ways of managing our emotions, our attitudes to them, the way we describe them are learned and differ from culture to culture. Still, behind the notion of a commonly held stock of emotion lies that of a universal human nature. And until fairly recently, and for a good part of the twentieth century, this has been a reviled notion, Darwin's book was out of favour for a long time after his death. The climate of opinion has changed now, and Ekman's superb edition is a major publishing event and has been enthusiastically welcomed.
   As must be clear now, I think that the exercise of imagination and ingenuity as expressed in literature supports Darwin's view. It would not be possible to read and enjoy literature from a time remote from our own, or from a culture that was profoundly different from our own, unless we shared some common emotional ground, some deep reservoir of assumptions, with the writer. An annotated edition that clarifies matters of historical circumstance or local custom or language is always useful, but it's never fundamentally necessary to a reading. What we have in common with each other is just as extraordinary it its way as all our exotic differences. I mentioned at the beginning the parochial and the universal as polarities in literature. One might think of literature as encoding both our cultural and genetic inheritance. Each of these two elements, genes and culture, have had a reciprocal shaping effect, for as primates we are intensely social creatures, and our social environment has exerted over time a powerful adaptive pressure. This geneculture co-evolution, elaborated by EO Wilson among others, dissolves the oppositions of nature versus nurture. If one reads accounts of the systematic non-instrusive observations of troops of bonobo - bonobos and chimps rather than baboons are our closest relatives - one sees rehearsed all the major themes of the English nineteenth century novel: alliances made and broken, individuals rising while others fall, plots hatched, revenge, gratitude, injured pride, successful and unsuccessful courtship, bereavement and mourning. Approximately five million years separate us and the bonobos from our common ancestor - and given that a lot of this coming and going is ultimately about sex (I'm talking here about bonobos and the nineteenth century novel) that's a very long time during which, cumulatively, successful social strategies effect the distribution of certain genes and not others.
   That we have a nature, that it's values are self-evident to us to the point of invisibility, and that it would be a different nature if we were, say, termites, was a point Wilson was trying to make when he invented a highly educated, professorial termite, the Dean of Termitities who delivers a stirring commencement day address to his fellow termites:

Since our ancestors, the macrotermitine termites, achieved 10 kilogram weight and larger brains during their rapid evolution through the late Tertiary period and learned to write with pheromone script, termitistic scholarship has refined ethical philosophy. It is now possible to express the deotological imperatives of moral behaviour with precision. These imperatives are mostly self-evident and universal. They are the very essence of termitity. They include the love of darkness and the deep saprophytic, basidiomycetic penetralia of the soil; the centrality of colony life amidst a richness of war and trade among colonies; the sanctity of physiological caste system; the evil of personal reproduction by worker castes; the mystery of deep love for reproductive siblings, which turns to hatred the instant they mate; rejection of the evil of personal rights; the infinite aesthetic pleasure of phenomenal song; the aesthetic pleasure of eating from nestmates' anuses after the shedding of the skin; the joy of cannibalism and surrender of the body for consumption when sick or injured… Some termitistically inclined scientists, particularly the ethologists and sociobiologists, argue that our social organisation is shaped by our genes and that our ethical precepts simply reflect the peculiarities of termite evolution. They assert that ethical philosophy must take into account the structure of the termite brain and the evolutionary history of the species. Socialisation is genetically channelled and some forms of it all but inevitable. This proposal has created major academic controversy…

That is to say that whether it's a saga, a concrete poem, a Bildungsroman or a haiku, and regardless of when it was written an in what colony, you would just know a piece of termite literature as soon as you've read a line or two. Extrapolating from the termite literary tradition, we can say that our own human literature does not define human nature so much exemplify it.

***

If there are human universals that transeed culture, then it follows that they do not change, or they do not change easily. And if something does change in us historically, then by definition, it is not human nature that has changed, but some characteristic special to a certain time and circumstance. And yet there are writers who like to make their point by assuming that human nature is frail entity, subject to sudden lurches - exciting revolutionary improvements or deeply regrettable deterioration, and defining the moment of you choice has always been an irresistible intellectual pursuit. No one, I think, has yet exceeded Virginia Woolf for precision in this matter, though she does allow a certain ironic haziness about the actual date: 'On or about December 1910', she wrote in her essay Character in Fiction, 'human character changed,'. Woolf of course was preoccupied with the great gulf, as she saw it, that separated her generation from her parents'. The famous anecdote may or may not be true, but one hopes it was. It has Lytton Strachey entering a drawing room in 1908, encountering Virginia and her sister, pointing to a stain on Vanessa's dress and enquiring, 'Semen?' Virginia wrote, 'With that one word, all barriers of reticence and reserve went down'. The nineteenth century had officially ended. The world would never be the same again.
   I remember similar apocalyptic generational claims made in the Sixties and early seventies. Human nature changed forever, it was claimed at the time, in a field near Woodstock in 1967, or in the same year with the release of Sergeant Pepper, or the year before on a certain undistinguished street in San Fransisco. The Age of Aquarius had dawned, and things would never be the same again.
   Less light-headed than Virginia Woolf but equally definitive, was TS Eliot in his essay The Metaphysical Poets. He discovered that in the seventeenth century 'a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered. ' He was, of course, speaking of English poets, who 'possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience' but I think we can assume that he thought they shared a biology with other people. His theory, which as he conceded, was perhaps too brief to carry conviction expresses both Eliot's regret (this dissociation was not a good thing) and his hopes (this dissociation could be reversed by those modern poets who would redefine modern sensibilities to his prescription).
   Jacob Burkhardt defining his own choice moment, in The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, discerned a blossoming, not simply in human nature, but in consciousness itself: 'In the Middle Ages, he wrote, 'both sides of human consciousness - that which was turned within as that which was turned without - lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation… But at the close of the thirteenth century, Italy began to swarm with individuality; the ban laid upon human personality was dissolved….'
   The French historian Philippe Aries defined a radical shift in human emotions in the eighteenth century when parents began to feel a self-conscious love for their children. Before then, a child was little more than a tiny, incapable adult, likely to be carried off by disease and therefore not worth investing with too much feeling. A thousand Medieval tombstones and their heartfelt inscriptions to a departed child may have provided the graveyard for this particular theory, but Arie's work, demonstrates a secondary or parallel ambition in the pursuit of the defining moment of change in human nature - that is, the aim of locating the roots of our modernity. This is more or less central to the project of intellectual history - to ask at which moment, in which set of circumstances, we became recognisable to ourselves. At least some of these candidates will be familiar to you: the invention of agriculture ten thousand years ago, or, perhaps closely related, the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Or the writing of Hamlet - a man so anguished. bored, indecisive an generally -put-upon by the fact of his own existence that we welcome him into our hearts and find no precursor for him in literature; we can fix the beginnings of the modern mind in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century; the agricultural or industrial revolutions which gathered populations into cities, and eventually made possible mass consumption, mass political parties, mass communication; with the writings of Kafka, a most artfully or wilfully dissociated sensibility; or with the invention of writing itself, a mere several thousand years ago which made possible a geometrical increase in the transmission of culture; the publication of Einstein's Special and General Theories, the first performance of the Rite of Spring, the publication of Joyce's Ulysses, or the dropping of a nuclear weapon on Hiroshima after we accepted, whether we wanted it or not, stewardship for the whole planet. Some used to plump for the storming of the Winter Palace, though I'd prefer to that the radically unadorned, conversationally reflective early poetry of Wordsworth; or by association, the French Enlightenment and the invention of universal human rights.
   The biological view is long and, by these terms, unspectacular, though I would say no less interesting: one speaks not of a moment, but an immeasurable tract of irretrievable time whose traces are a handful of bones and stone artefacts which demand all our interpretative genius; with the neo-cortex evolving at the astonishing rate of an extra tea spoon of grey matter every hundred thousand years, hominids made tools, acquired language, became aware of their own existence and that of others, and of their mortality, took a view on the after-life, and accordingly buried their dead. Possibly the Neanderthals who fell into extinction 30,000 years ago, were the first into the modern age. But they just weren't modern enough to survive the pace.
   You could say that what is pursued in all these accounts is the secular equivalent of a creation myth. Literary writers seem to prefer an explosive, decisive moment, the miracle of birth, to a dull continuum of infinitesimal change. More or less the whole time span of culture can be embraced when we ask - who is the oldest, who is the ur, modern human being - mitochondrial Eve, or Alan Turing?
   Our interest in the roots of modernity is not just a consequence of accelerating social change; implicit in the idea of the definitive moment, of rupture with the past, is the notion that human nature is a specific historical product, shaped by shared values, circumstances of upbringing within a certain civilisation - in other words, that there is no human nature at all beyond that which develops at a particular time and in a particular culture. By this view the mind is an all-purpose, infinitely adaptable computing machine operating a handful of wired-in rules. We are born tabula rasa, and it is our times that shape us.
   This view, known to some as the Social Science Model, and to others as environmental determinism, was the dominant one in the twentieth century, particularly in its first half. It had its roots in anthropology, especially in the work of Margaret Mead and her followers, and in behavioural psychology. Writing in Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, published in 1935, Mead wrote: ' We are forced to conclude that human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions'. This view found endorsement across the social sciences, and solidified in the post war years into a dogma that had clear political dimensions. There was a time when to challenge it with free reference to a biological dimension to existence would be to court academic, and even social pariah status. Like Christian theologians, the cultural relativists freed us from all biological constraints, and set mankind apart from all other life on earth. And within this view, the educated man or woman pronouncing on a favoured date for the transformation of human nature would be on firm ground epistemologically - we are what the world makes us, and when the world changes dramatically, the so do we in our essentials. It can all happen, as Virginia Woolf observed for herself, in the space of a generation.
   The famous behaviourist, John Watson, Professor of Psychology at Johns Hopkins published an influential book on child-rearing in 1928. As Christina Hardyment showed in her marvellous book, Dream Babies, there is hardly a better window into the collective mind of a society, its view of human nature, than the childcare handbooks it produces.

'Give me a dozen healthy infants, [Watson wrote] well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any kind of specialist I might select - doctor, lawyer, merchant chief, and yes, beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.'

Human nature was clay in his hands. I can't help feeling that the following passage from Watson's childcare book, beyond its unintentional comedy, reflects or foretells a century of doomed, tragic social experiments in shaping human nature, and shows us a skewed science, devoid of evidence, - and no less grotesque that the pseudo-science that perverted Darwin's work to promote theories of racial supremacy:

'The sensible way to bring up children is to treat them as young adults. Dress them, bathe them with care and circumspection. Let your behaviour always be objective an kindly firm. Never hug and kiss them. Never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head when they make a good job of a difficult task…Put the child out in the back yard a large part of the time…Do this from the time that it is born… Let it learn to overcome difficulties almost from the moment of birth…away from your watchful eye. If your heart is too tender, and you must watch the child, make yourself a peephole, so that you can see without being seen, or use a periscope'.

The Psychological Care of Young Infants, hugely successful at the time was pronounced by Atlantic Monthly to be 'a godsend to parents'.
   The ideas of Mead and Watson, who were simply prominent figures among many promoting the near infinite malleability of human nature, found general acceptance in the public, and in the universities, where their descendants flourish today in various forms, including the political correctness movement which holds that since the human condition is a social construct which in turns is defined by language, it is possible and desirable to reform the condition by changing the language. No one should doubt that some good impulses lay behind the Standard Model. Margaret Mead in particular, working at a time when the European empires had consolidated but had not yet begun to crumble, had a strong anti-racist element to her work, and she was determined to oppose the condescending view of primitive inferiority and to insist that each culture must be judged in its own terms. When Mead and Watson were at their most active, the Soviet revolution still held great hopes for mankind. If learning makes us what we are, the inequalities could be eliminated if we shared the same environment. Educate parents in the proper methods of childcare and new generations of improved people would emerge. Human nature could be fundamentally re-moulded by the makers of social policy. We were perfectible, and the wrongs and inequalities of the past could be rectified by radical alterations to the social environment. The cruelties and absurdities of Social Darwinism an eugenics, and later, the new threat posed by the social policies of Hitler's Germany engendered a disgust with the biological perspective that helped entrench a belief in a socially determined nature that could be engineered for the better of all.
   In fact, the Third Reich cast a long shadow over free scientific enquiry in the decades after the second world war. Various branches of psychology were trapped by intellectual fear, deterred by recent history from considering the mind as a biological product of adaptive forces, even while, in nearby biology departments, from the nineteen forties onwards, Darwinism was uniting with Mendelian genetics and molecular biology to form the powerful alliance known as the Modern Synthesis.
   In the late fifties, the young Paul Ekman, who had no firm convictions of his own, set off for New Guinea with head and shoulder photographs of modern Americans expressing various emotions - surprise, fear, disgust, joy and so on. He discovered that his sample group of stone age Highlanders who had had no, or virtually no, contact with the modern world, were able to make up easily recognisable stories about each expression. They also mimed for him the facial expressions in response to stories he gave them - you come across a pig that has been dead for some days. His work, and later, cleverly designed experiments with Japanese and Americans, which took into account the display rules of the different cultures, clearly vindicated Darwin's conclusions. As Ekman writes;

Social experience influences attitudes about emotion, creates display and feeling rules, develops and tunes the particular occasions which will most rapidly call forth an emotion. The expression of our emotions, the particular configurations of muscular movements, however, appear to be fixed, enabling understanding across generations, across cultures, and within cultures between strangers as well as intimates.

Before leaving for New Guinea he had paid a visit to Margaret Mead. Her firm view was that facial expressions differ from culture to culture as much as customs and values. She was distinctly cool about Ekman's research. And yet towards the end of her life she explained in her autobiography in 1972 that she and her colleagues had held back from the consideration of the biological bases of behaviour because of anxieties about the political consequences. How strange, this reversal of historical circumstances, that for Mead universality in expression or in human nature should appear to lend support to racism, while for Darwin such considerations undermined its flimsy theoretical basis.
   Mead and her generation of anthropologists, arriving at a Stone Age settlement with their notebooks, gifts and decent intentions, did not fully understand, (though Darwin, along with most novelists could have told them) as they exchanged smiles and greetings with their subjects, what a vast pool of shared humanity, of shared assumption, was necessary, and already being drawn on, for them to do their work. As the last of these precious cultures have vanished, the data has been revisited. Donald Brown in his book Human Universals, compiled a list of what human individuals and societies hold in common. It's both long, and, given the near infinite range of all possible patterns of behaviour, quite specific. When reading it, it is worth bearing in mind Wilson's termite dean. Brown includes - I'm choosing at random - tool making, preponderant right-handedness, specific childhood fears, knowledge that other people have an inner life, trade, giving of gifts, notions of justice, importance of gossip, hospitality, hierarchies, and so on. What's interesting about Brown's characterisation of what the calls the Universal People, is the number of pages he devotes to language - again quite specific - for example, UP language has contrasts between vowels and contrasts between stops and non-stops. Their language is symbolic, invariably confers prestige. This surely, at the higher level of mental functioning, is what binds the human family. We know now that no blank disk all-purpose machine could learn language at the speed and facility that a child does. A 3 year old daily solves scores of ill-posed problems. An instinct for language is a central part of our nature.
   On our crowded planet, we are no longer able to visit Stone Age peoples untouched by modern times. Mead and her contemporaries would never have wanted to put the question - What is that we hold in common with such people? - and anthropologists no longer have the opportunity of first contact. We can, however, reach to our book shelves. Literature must be our anthropology. Here is a description - two thousand seven hundred years old - of a woman who has been waiting for more than two decades for her beloved husband to come home. Someone has told her that he has at last arrived, and is downstairs, and that she must go and greet him. But she asks herself, is it really him?

So, still uncertain, Penelope tells Odysseus they'll sleep in separate rooms, and she gives orders for the marriage bed to be moved out of the bedroom. But of course, he knows this bed can't be moved - he knocked it together himself, and reminds her just how he did it. Thus he proves beyond doubt he really is her husband; but now he's upset that she thought he was an impostor, and they're already heading for a marital spat.

Customs may change - dead suitors may be lying in the hallway, with no homicide charges pending. But we recognise the human essence of these lines. Within the emotional and the expressive we remain what we are. As Darwin put it in his conclusion to the Expression, 'the language of the emotions… is certainly of importance for the welfare of mankind'. In Homer's case we extend Ekman's 'understanding across the generations' - a hundred and thirty of them at least.

***

The Human Genome Sequencing Consortium concluded its recent report in Nature magazine with these words:

Finally, it has not escaped our notice that the more we learn about the human genome, the more there is to explore.

This form of respectful echoing within the tradition must surely appeal to those who admire literary modernism. And as the human genome is sequenced, it is reasonable to ask just whose genome is this anyway? What lucky individual was chosen to represent us all? Who is the universal person? The answer is that the genes of fifteen people were merged into just the sort of composite, plausible, imaginary person a novelist might dream up, and I leave you with now in the contemplation of this metaphorical convergence of these two noble and distinct forms of investigation into our condition, literature and science. That which binds us, our common nature - is what literature has always, knowingly and helplessly, given voice to. And it is this universality which science, now entering another of its exhilarating moments, is set to explore.